5.2 Experiments and Results
5.2.3 Retrieval of Rare and Frequent OOV PNs
Paralelamente, à prática desenvolvida como TM na FCP – Futebol, SAD, realizei uma revisão sistemática sobre as funções e competências dos gestores do desporto, a qual é apresentada no artigo científico seguinte, apresentado na sua íntegra. Este será submetido à publicação internacional Journal of Global
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Sport managers’ profile: a systematic review
Abstract
The present study consists in a systematic review about sport managers, more specifically, the tasks assigned to them and the competencies needed to accomplish those. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to map the literature of sport manager’s competencies and tasks from 2011 to January of 2019.. The search was made on EBSCO, B-on and Open Dissertations, using the following keywords: “sport managers OR sport directors OR sport administrators”, “sport managers AND qualifications”, “sport managers AND responsibilities”, “sport managers AND traits”, “sport managers AND roles”, “sport managers AND competencies” and “sport managers AND characteristics” for peer reviewed articles and dissertations. After applied the inclusion and exclusion criteria 33 studies were include in the revision. Sport managers tend to be men, between 30 and 40 years old with a degree in physical education. A good sport manager must have competencies such as integrity, specific knowledge, resource allocation, delegation of authority, motivation of employees and strategic and innovative thinking in order to accomplish the most important and more time consuming tasks like planning/organization, coordination/evaluation or information.
Keywords: SPORT MANAGER, FUNCTIONAL PROFILE, COMPETENCIES, TASKS, REVIEW
99 Introduction
The sport management scientific area has been evolving, mainly since the last decades of the last century. Several authors pointed (e.g. Pires & Sarmento, 2001; Jones et al., 2008 and Mangra et al., 2015) that sport managers area is relatively recent, noticeable in multiple aspects, like scientific research, the birth of specific associations of this area and the openness of labour market to sport managers.
The society, like sport management, has been changing too. Each day tends to be more globalised (Bilohur, 2018), borders between countries are fainter than they were, what, among other things, makes the labour market more competitive, since the candidates pool to a certain job is much bigger than it was in the old days (IMF Research Department, 2006)5. This tendency is not new. In fact, already in 1999, before the turn of the century, Smith & Stewart (1999) had highlighted the increased importance of the commercial side, what almost compel (assuming that organizations want to remain competitive in the market) to a growing of managers professionalization.That increase of importance came accompanied with a complexification of the tasks, which provoked the development of more ideas and theories in the scope of sport management. This fact, joined with the growing of society’s educational level (Roser & Ortiz-Ospina, 2018) lead to an increase of professionalization in many jobs, in which sport managers are also included (Shilbury & Ferkins, 2011). However, that increase is not enough in sport managers. There are still many volunteer sport managers, who, obviously, aren’t fully concentrated in their sport management tasks, because they need to have other jobs. Adding to that, many people working in this area don’t have specific education, what compromises their response to the variety of problems faced by sport managers (Augusto, 2015; Jovanova-Simeva, 2015 and Juravich et al., 2017).
5
International Monetary Fund Research Department (2006). THE GLOBALIZATION OF LABOR. In World Economic Outlook, April 2007: Spillovers and Cycles in the Global Economy. IMF eLibrary.
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Indeed, entities with some relevance in sport panorama no longer fit with an amateur management and little qualified. The level of exigency imposed by competitors, partners and other stakeholders doesn’t allow that amateurism and forces sport managers to have knowledge about a wide range of areas, that they will be able to deal (Capinussú, 2005 and Chirila & Chirila, 2015). In order to address properly that growing exigency, sport managers must have some competencies that capacitate them to give an adequate answer to the challenges commonly faced, nowadays, by them. These competencies should be gained or trained through specific education adapted to today’s sport management demands by offering a global and international approach, since we are in a broader market (Miragaia & Soares, 2017).
Joaquim et al. (2011) in a similar systematic review of the sport managers literature until the final of the first decade of the current century, and pointed out the constant mutation of sport management, with new features and competencies required each year, we consider that it is important to give a follow up to that by doing a overview if the literature since 2011, that embraces what authors have found related to the sport managers, since we haven’t found similar studies after that. This will allow identify tendencies and identify the changes occurred in sport managers and, in a broader sense, in sport management.
Following that line, the main purpose of this study is to map the literature of sport manager’s competencies and tasks from 2011 to January of 2019. For that, we chose to do a systematic review, since it will give us a very comprehensive view of the actual panorama of sport managers in today’s world, what can be important, for example, for universities as it gives a basis for them to improve the quality and suitability of sport management education.
101 Methodology Literature search and study select process
This study is a systematic review. This type of literature review uses a research question as a starting point to find all types of scientific work related to it, forming a very embracing sample, all associated with the researched topic. The final product is a synthesis of the found literature (Siddaway et al., 2019). According to some authors there are six key stages on a systematic review. Scoping is the first phase in which authors do a first approach to the review, establishing their research question. Afterwards, comes planning of the entire review, with definition of key words and inclusion criteria. Third phase is identification (searching), characterised by the implementation of our systematic review by searching for literature in databases. Next stage is screening, where you should import references to a citation manager in order to save them, find any duplicates and exclude articles that don’t fit in the study. Then, is necessary to read all remaining articles to understand which are eligible to the study in a stage called eligibility. Last phase is study quality, the verification stage, to identify any bias that may affect the study.
In order to define which key words were going to be used, we read some previous systematic reviews that intended to study the same thematic and some scientific articles, namely, the systematic review of Joaquim et al. (2011), which was our starting point, in order to understand which words and research equations were usually used to explore the theme under review. Having made those readings it was decided to use the following research equations: “sport managers OR sport directors OR sport administrators”, “sport managers AND qualifications”, “sport managers AND responsibilities”, “sport managers AND traits”, “sport managers AND roles”, “sport managers AND competencies” and “sport managers AND characteristics”.
Then, using those words, it was made a research on three databases: EBSCO, B-on and Open Dissertations. It was decided to search on this three because we considered they would retrieve a comprehensive sample, with articles from
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all over the academic world, which would serve as a basis to a good systematic review. The first one was used by Joaquim et al. (2011), which was also considered in the database selection.
Inclusion criteria were added: only peer-reviewed articles and dissertations, with full-text in Portuguese, English and Spanish available, published between January of 2011 and January of 2019 in academic journals were accepted. Finally, using the mentioned criteria, we searched in the titles of articles for the chosen key words. It was used this range of time in order to make the update of Joaquim et al. (2011) revision to the present.
EBSCO retrieved 32 articles, Open Dissertations retrieved 4 dissertations and B-on retrieved 230. When we introduced all the 266 references on Endnote, it detected 54 duplicates that were immediately removed. Then, when reading the titles of those 266 articles, were detected and moved to trash 57 more duplicates. This means that from the initial search of 266, only 155 weren’t duplicates (there were 111 duplicates in total) and, therefore, were the only ones whose abstracts were read to see if all of them were related to the subject we wanted to study.
From that reading, we excluded 114 references because they were not related with the subject under study, 1 because it wasn’t wrote in one of the accepted languages, 1 because it wasn’t a scientific article and 6 because it wasn’t possible to find full-text, neither on databases, neither by doing a simple search using a search engine. Thus, 33 articles were left, being selected for full reading, analysis and interpretation of findings.
The process that led us to our final sample of 33 references is illustrated in Figure 1.
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Figure 1: Path to the final sample of literature used in our systematic review.
Analytical framework
From each study was extracted some basic descriptive information, like author, year, country and data collection tools in order to understand which are the common points between the literature included in the scoping review. While reading the selected studies, three main themes stood out. Thus, we decided to divide this part in three, in order to facilitate the analysis and its comprehension. In one hand we have researches related to the competencies and characteristics of sport managers and in the other there are studies related to their responsibilities and tasks. It was elaborated a resume table with an individual analysis of each research, also divided in those two main areas, which is displayed in each of this sections. The other theme, which is referred firstly, is the demographic characteristics of sport managers. Since this
information was given along with the main goal of each study, we opted for not having a separate table for this theme.
104 Results
Firstly, general descriptive information comprising all research, such as data collection tools, the country where the study took place, the year of publication, sample size and methodologies.
Secondly the results focused on the three identified themes: sport managers demographic characteristics, sport managers competencies and sport
managers tasks/responsibilities.
Descriptive analysis
Concerning to the type of research, the chosen sample is comprehended by thirty one empirical studies and two conceptual studies, one of which is a systematic review. It is evident a supremacy of empirical studies over conceptual studies. It is also possible to detect an outlier by analysing the language used. In thirty three studies, one was written in Spanish, seven in Portuguese and twenty five in English.
As data collection tools the most used were questionnaires, used in sixteen studies, and semi-structured interviews, with ten examples. Were also used interviews, structured interviews, focus groups and document analysis. In four cases were used two of the mentioned techniques.
The Graphic 1 presented the information about the geographical area where studies took place. Brazil is leading, with six studies, followed by Turkey with one less and Romania, Iran, Spain, USA, South Africa, Portugal, UK, Taiwan, North Macedonia, Australia, Slovenia and Cyprus that range from one to three references.
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Graphic 1: Studies distribution per country
Concerning publication years of, we observed a great homogeneity in terms of number of studies (around four studies), with only two exceptions being 2013 and 2019 because of the, respectively, abundance and lack of studies. There were selected nine from 2013 and zero from 2019. This inexistence of studies is explained by the fact that the imposed chronological limit was January of 2019 therefore it is not possible to make a comparison with other years. This distribution is illustrated in the Graphic 2.
Graphic 2: Studies distribution for publication year
Brazil Turkey Romania Iran Portugal Spain USA South Africa Slovenia Cyprus UK Taiwan Australia North Macedonia 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 0 2 4 6 8 10 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 (only 1 month)
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Finally, we looked at the samples used in the several researches and realised that the biggest had 978 elements, while the smallest had only three. Commonly, the participants were composed by sport managers or other similar designations like sport administrators, sport directors or simply managers. Others were constituted by more specific offices like high sport technicians, presidents, general managers or national performance directors. There were also some samples integrated by professionals that aren’t managers, like coaches, physical education teachers, technical analyst or lecturers. Apart from this, one aspect that also stood out was the frequency of people that worked at a municipal level, what can be explained by their proximity and openness to help in scientific studies.
Who are the sport managers?
One of the important insights given by researches is the demographic data of sport managers. Not every study specifies this data, but almost half of them did, what allows us to take some important conclusions about the profile of those professionals.
Beginning with age, it was possible to realise that sport managers tend to be in their thirties or forties (Filho et al., 2013; Eksteen et al., 2013; Mello & Silva,
2013; Retar et al., 2013; Miranda et al., 2017; Cárdenas et al., 2017). There was a study with younger sport managers (Naidoo et al., 2015), but only in terms of percentage of age bracket (26 to 35 years was the most represented), because on average the results were the same. Other studies were made with older people and they all had in common the fact of studying higher levels of the organisations, what certainly explains the higher ages (DragoȘ & Cristea, 2016; Juravich, 2012; Balci &Erdeveciler, 2017; Juravich et al., 2017).
Related to age, there’s the experience time. As we could have seen, in general, sports managers have between less than five and ten years of experience in their actual job or in similar ones.
Specially, today, when the debate about gender inequalities is more intense, it is necessary to enhance the data about gender representation. In sport
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management, like in other areas of our society, men are still more represented than women. In eight researches with gender information, there was only one in which equality was registered (Rasool & Zahra, 2015), because in the others men were dominant (Filho et al., 2013; Eksteen et al., 2013; Mello & Silva, 2013; Naidoo et al., 2015; Batista et al., 2016; DragoȘ & Cristea, 2016; Miranda et al., 2017).
Nowadays, according to the selected studies, almost all sport managers have a degree. However, the tendency is not having specific academic education in sport management. It is also visible that many of sport managers have a degree in physical education, some in management and even others, even though very rare, in law (Miranda et al., 2017; Cárdenas et al., 2017).
Sport manager’s competencies
Sport manager’s competencies was one of the identified main themes, with 23 studies. Table 1 displays every study considered in this section.
Table 1: Studies related with the theme competencies
Title Author/Year/Context Purpose/Sample Data Collection
Tools Main Outcomes
Psychological profile of Romanian sports managers in an international comparative perspective
Maria, M.-O., Iustin, L., Bogdan, T., & Cosmina, L. L. (2011)
Romania
Search for differences between psychological characteristics of Romanian sports managers and people from Spain and Sweden / 200 sport managers Questionnaire (Karolinska Scales of Personality) with 135 items and 15 scales Predominantly, sport managers shown positive psychological characteristics. They had higher values, in comparison, of social desirability, psychic anxiety, monotony avoidance, impulsiveness, inhibition of aggressiveness and guilt.
Performance leadership and management in elite sport: Recommendations, advice and suggestions from national performance directors
Arnold, R., Fletcher, D., & Molyneux, L. (2012) United Kingdom
Find out some
recommendations on how to improve performance leadership and management in elite sport / 13 national performance directors Semi-structured interview
Managers should take their time on establishing an approach, understanding roles, developing contextual awareness, enhancing personal skills and strengthening relationships. Passion, motivation, integrity, confidence, organization, conflict management and strategic and critical thinking are some skills valued in managers or leaders
108 Examining General Managers in the North American Professional Sport Context: Upper Echelons and Logics of Action as Determinants of Performance
Juravich, M. F. (2012) USA
Examine the relationship between general managers (GM) of NBA MLB, NHL and NFL strategic decision making and organizational performance / 276 GM
Descriptive data
On average, GM were 50 years old, had 6 years of experience in the current job, 10 in similar jobs and 4 of playing experience. GM tenure and age are related to organizational performance.
Team player talent mediates the GM tenure – organizational
performance relationship.
There is a moderating effect of team composition (payroll) on the
relationship between GM playing experience and team player talent, as well as a moderating effect of head coach tenure on the relationship between years of GM tenure, front office and playing experience and team player talent.
Profile Manager Brazilian Sports: Literature Review
Filho, M., Mulatinho, C., Fatta, G., Lima, W., Silva, T., & Rocha, V. (2013)
Brazil
Deepen knowledge about Brazilian sport managers profile
Despite a recent increase of female sport managers, sport management is still dominated by men. Predominantly their age varies between 30 and 49 years, they have little experience and have a degree in physical education. Decision making styles and professionalization of sports: experience of managers of the offices of youth and sports in Yazd province
Benar, N., Yeganeh Far, N., Fallah Mehrabadi, S., & Entezary Zarej, M. (2013) Iran
Study decision making styles of Youth and Sports Offices managers in the Yazd province / 39 managers and vice- managers of the Offices of Youth and Sport
Questionnaire (Scott and Bruce with 25 questions)
Female managers use, preferably, spontaneous and then rational styles, while male managers prefer intuitive style. Avoidant style was the most significant among Yazd province managers. Management
competencies of sport club managers in the North- West Province, South Africa
Eksteen, E., Malan, D. D. J., & Lotriet, R. (2013)
South Africa
Compare perceptions of coaches and sports club managers about competencies needed by the latter in order to make a competent work / 30 sports club managers and 30 coaches
Questionnaire
Coaches think managers are not competent enough in their tasks.
Sports managers are, generally, men, in the 35- 44 age group with a university degree
109 Sports gym
manager’s competences
Mello, J. A. C. d., & Silva, S. A. P. d. S. (2013)
Brazil
Define a skills profile for sport managers who work in gyms / 12 gym managers
Semi-structured interview
The majority of gym managers were men, with a degree in physical education, with, on average, 39 years of age and 11 of experience in management tasks It was confirmed that competencies could be divided in three groups: knowledge, skills and attitudes. The most mentioned components of competence related to the first were people
management and finances, to the second was leadership and to the third were client focus, management and seek for knowledge.
Study regarding the Ethics of the Managers from the Municipal Sports Clubs in Romania
Răzvan Barbu, M. C. (2013) Romania
Determine the ethical level of sport managers from Romania and provide some ways to solve ethical dilemmas / 6 managers from municipal clubs
Questionnaire
Results demonstrate a high level of ethical behaviour among Romanian sport managers of municipal clubs. Issues like discrimination, doping and financial engineering are not observed in the analysed sample.
Key competences of Slovenian sport managers
Retar, I., Plevnik, M., & Kolar, E. (2013)
Slovenia
Investigate which are the main general and specific competencies of sport managers/ 85 sport managers